Session was Australian based which means they would have to do all sorts of horrible things when asked by the government, such as even letting police impersonate users...
I just checked and they claim to have moved their infra to Switzerland.
There are many other issues, some I've forgotten about since I would never trust it in the first place. They also require a phone number even!
Seeing them go, I feel neutral. It's always good to have more anonymity software, just not this for me.
Within the US, it's far more common than you think. That's typical senior dev money in a large company in cities like St Louis or KC. What is rare outside of the biggest markets is the whole "enough RSUs to double your salary" thing.
Interestingly I applied for one of their senior frontend positions that required a "high level of experience" in Australia, they said 120k AUD with no room to go higher. Went with an offer of 170k instead.
At least in my experience, having worked in both Florida and California, that's more of a wash than people imagine it's going to be -- and more so than the "cost of living calculators" tend to demonstrate, at least if you're a renter.
I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.
You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.
For a Senior perhaps. The figures I find for Switzerland are more in the 90-120 range depending on the source. Also, I think what OP was referring to is the 'most markets' bit. Switzerland is the best paying country in Europe (discounting London).
> Switzerland is the best paying country in Europe (discounting London).
How does that look when you correct for costs of living, because I imagine that would put London at the bottom of the list, as one of those places where senior-level tech salary is not enough to afford living in the city itself (and I don't mean the City of London, but the rest of it too).
For a senior developer, $150,000 is about right. I'm looking at the latest half dozen jobs I've seen on LinkedIn for open senior developer positions and they all start at that number, and range up to $185k to $200k. Digging a little deeper, I see some th atstart well above that number, but it's for the huge companies you're thinking of -- Google, Netflix, Github.
Time to broaden their hiring pool then, $150k is double the cost of a senior developer in many other parts of the world (yes including English speaking first world countries).
When you've got 90 days till the doors close you cant be picky about your hiring pool.
The claim is that 150k is the baseline that is often exceeded. I don't know the region you're looking for on LinkedIn, but what I see for European jobs is that they barely crack 100k for developers. At least the senior, non highly specialist, jobs I'm seeing.
"Session is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that protects your private data. A decentralized app designed, built, and operated by a global community of privacy experts."
I feel like a crazy person for having to write this, but: if you are starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses), then you need to have a business plan. If you launch a business and you have not done the work to have a business plan, then in 99.999% of situations, your business will fail. A business plan includes market & competitive research, a revenue plan based on that research that includes realistic pricing models and costs, a marketing plan, and several options for when things don't turn out like you planned. This isn't even Business 101, this is like Remedial Intro to Business. If you don't have this worked out before you launch, you have already failed.
The corollary for this is as a user, you should determine whether or not the business you are planning to depend on has a business model before you choose to depend on them. If there is no apparent income stream, then the business will close at some point and you may as well skip all the heartburn and choose not to use that business for anything you care about. BlueSky, I'm looking at you right now.
Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions. Maybe this also correlates with qualities like blind optimism, or disbelief in institutions like capitalism?
That’s not really a big deal since the session encryption was insecure anyway. It feels almost like a honeypot after they've removed forward secrecy. If you’re looking for a decentralized alternative SimpleX Chat is a more secure option.
Surprised to hear this since my understanding was that Session was run on a crypto coin based, user hosted onion routing servers. Do they mean the dev company behind Session is shutting down?
An anecdote I have: a friend once had narcotics shipped intl. through Session a few years ago.
Afaik Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?
The gross income to the employee might be 75k in Germany, but the cost to the employer is roughly twice that amount in turn.
In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.
Yeah , but the German pension system is unfortunately a scam .
Therefore everyone is responsible for their own retirement (private investments e.g etfs) .
> In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have a lot less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.
Unfortunately this time, AI does not have vacations, healthcare, retirement or bills to pay and is available 24/7, 365 days on demand.
Many companies only see this as an opportunity to cut down on employees in 2026 and Session will do the same.
So that is why to answer your question:
> ...Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?
The main reason why the downsizing will continue until "AGI" is achieved internally.
A few months ago, a Session update logged me out. I tried to log back in, but my passphrase caused Session to crash. I tried the Play Store version, the F-Droid version, and the desktop version.
Support told me that login method had been around for a while, and I didn’t know it. So suddenly, I was locked out and couldn’t access MY ACCOUNT. I used to promote Session, but since their support response was basically a big “fuck you,” I say “fuck you too,” and I hope people switch to SimpleX.
I'd love to know where the $600k that Vitalik Buterin donated to them 3 short months ago went. I don't think they've adequately addressed this question.
I like the idea. But I’m pretty happy with Signal. Signal does require a phone number I think, but otherwise seems very similar.
Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.
>Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage
In many jurisdictions, telecoms form an abusive oligopoly, and you need to provide a state-issued identity document to get a phone number.
That is not at all reasonable for normal usage - unlike well-known non-abusive authentication methods, such as a keypair; or its even simpler cousin, the username/password.
I guess it depends on what you consider normal. Most of the humans I know find it vastly easier to produce a state issued id to an authority than to generate a public/private key pair.
Well, I and a lot of the people I'm going to talk to through things like Signal are going to have a state ID regardless as I live in a country where one practically needs to drive a car to function in society.
On top of that so many other things just inherently expect one to have a phone number. It would be somewhat odd to not have a phone number for most of the people I know and talk to through platforms like Signal.
So to your question of which is easier, having the state ID and a phone number is easier because I'll already have that for a multitude of reasons.
If you live in a place where its rare to have a phone number, then yes I agree Signal probably isn't a good choice.
Obtaining your first id is obviously difficult. But so is obtaining your first computer. If you’re on good terms with your government, obtaining the id is easier. That’s really the key. Sure if you focus on hostile states this stuff all makes sense. If you’re insistent on hiding from authorities then many things become much more difficult, by design.
I primarily use a nearly-bottom end android phone that's a few years old and just recently switched to an even older, even lower end android phone that is six years old. Neither has that issue.
Obviously, I'm not really claiming that it's not possible people are experiencing this issue, but it can't possibly be widespread.
I feel like most likely people are using android skins that aggressively kill apps in the background.
Signal's code quality is not conducive to security. They had an extremely bad state management bug that resulted in photos being sent to random contacts in your list (potentially life ruining implications if you're sending private photos).
For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year, and on top of this there are legal and operational overheads for running the STF.
Translation:
Our product makes no money, has no use case and we need $1M to survive.
Two ways a PE "cost saver" would fix this:
1. Claude + 1x senior engineer (in India).
2. CTO + Claude and no senior engineers / employees.
Given we have (allegedly) achieved "AGI" (heavily disputed) they don't need as many employees.
Especially those that are after $150k+ which when you can vibe code with Claude for less than $10k anyway. /s
So you are suggesting that a private communications and messaging system that proports to offer reliable anonymity is a reasonable use case for more-or-less unsupervised development by Claude? Because that is just the sort of use case where I would NOT trust an unsupervised AI.
Session was Australian based which means they would have to do all sorts of horrible things when asked by the government, such as even letting police impersonate users...
I just checked and they claim to have moved their infra to Switzerland.
There are many other issues, some I've forgotten about since I would never trust it in the first place. They also require a phone number even!
Seeing them go, I feel neutral. It's always good to have more anonymity software, just not this for me.
Never heard of them, and this page doesn't tell me what they do, but I've laughed at this line
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year
Not really, there's basically a single sub-market in the US market where that is the norm.
Within the US, it's far more common than you think. That's typical senior dev money in a large company in cities like St Louis or KC. What is rare outside of the biggest markets is the whole "enough RSUs to double your salary" thing.
the rare market is 250k+. You can get 150k in cleveland or milwaukee
Interestingly I applied for one of their senior frontend positions that required a "high level of experience" in Australia, they said 120k AUD with no room to go higher. Went with an offer of 170k instead.
Well, that aligns with both "total raise of 93k AUD" and "we need more money to afford to hire senior people"
I'd consider this a lowball in Austin
Whats the take-home after housing and expenses tho? It's the same in CA... massive salaries, but also massive taxes+housing expenses.
At least in my experience, having worked in both Florida and California, that's more of a wash than people imagine it's going to be -- and more so than the "cost of living calculators" tend to demonstrate, at least if you're a renter.
I actually ran a few numbers based on current costs. If you're making $120K/yr in Florida and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in Tampa ($1,642/mo, as of April 2026 according to Apartments.com), your after-tax take home is $98 (24% federal tax bracket, no state tax) and you have $78.4K after rent. If you're making $180K/yr in California and paying the average cost for a 1-bedroom rental in San Jose ($2,705/mo), your after-tax take home is $130.5K (24% federal tax bracket, 9.3% CA state tax bracket) and you have $98K left after housing.
You can keep fiddling with the numbers, but in most cases, the premium for getting a tech job in Silicon Valley is sufficiently high that you really are making more in absolute dollars despite the higher cost of living.
They are based in Switzerland . 140k USD median dev salary
Interesting claim, where do you gather that data? The quick results I got where from a 2024 report on TheNextWeb claiming its around 90k USD equivalent in Switzerland https://thenextweb.com/news/european-cities-highest-salaries...
Market rate for a senior engineer in much, much poorer Poland exceeds 80k at current exchange rates - ask me how I know.
I also had a contract in Switzerland for a brief, beautiful moment and in 2020 it was not weird to have an hourly rate exceeding 90CHF/h in this role.
Permanent employees were making anywhere in the range of 100-130k CHF, so the 140k USD figure is close adjusted for inflation.
https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries
Thanks for the data, 117500 CHF converted today is around 148k USD, and that means being in the top 25%
It clearly says that the median is 110k CHF ~ 140k USD
For a Senior perhaps. The figures I find for Switzerland are more in the 90-120 range depending on the source. Also, I think what OP was referring to is the 'most markets' bit. Switzerland is the best paying country in Europe (discounting London).
> Switzerland is the best paying country in Europe (discounting London).
How does that look when you correct for costs of living, because I imagine that would put London at the bottom of the list, as one of those places where senior-level tech salary is not enough to afford living in the city itself (and I don't mean the City of London, but the rest of it too).
I wouldn’t have replied if the session foundation hadn’t been based in Switzerland.
For a senior developer, $150,000 is about right. I'm looking at the latest half dozen jobs I've seen on LinkedIn for open senior developer positions and they all start at that number, and range up to $185k to $200k. Digging a little deeper, I see some th atstart well above that number, but it's for the huge companies you're thinking of -- Google, Netflix, Github.
Time to broaden their hiring pool then, $150k is double the cost of a senior developer in many other parts of the world (yes including English speaking first world countries).
When you've got 90 days till the doors close you cant be picky about your hiring pool.
The claim is that 150k is the baseline that is often exceeded. I don't know the region you're looking for on LinkedIn, but what I see for European jobs is that they barely crack 100k for developers. At least the senior, non highly specialist, jobs I'm seeing.
That salary is not unheard of at all in London. Especially when you convert £ to $.
Sure but Londons known for being high wages. Now change that location to Cornwall or the North of England and watch it get almost cut in half.
not unheard of, but not typical.
Yeah I'm not sure what they do, or why they need support
A collection of strongly opinionated crypto experts running on hopes more than money is no way to run a government^W^W a messaging app
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I feel like a crazy person for having to write this, but: if you are starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses), then you need to have a business plan. If you launch a business and you have not done the work to have a business plan, then in 99.999% of situations, your business will fail. A business plan includes market & competitive research, a revenue plan based on that research that includes realistic pricing models and costs, a marketing plan, and several options for when things don't turn out like you planned. This isn't even Business 101, this is like Remedial Intro to Business. If you don't have this worked out before you launch, you have already failed.
The corollary for this is as a user, you should determine whether or not the business you are planning to depend on has a business model before you choose to depend on them. If there is no apparent income stream, then the business will close at some point and you may as well skip all the heartburn and choose not to use that business for anything you care about. BlueSky, I'm looking at you right now.
I think this was their business plan. See if it works and, if it doesn't, shut it down
Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions. Maybe this also correlates with qualities like blind optimism, or disbelief in institutions like capitalism?
> Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists
That's a mighty broad brush you're painting with over there.
Not sure why it's always a binary: either give us $1M or we shut down.
Vast majority of products and services can continue on or near zero, with slow or zero velocity.
Really, you can't fire half the team if you have to and keep operating?
1.75M MAU requires very small infrastructure.
Yeah, there is no way they need $1M for the servers, come on...
God forbid someone get paid for their work.
That’s not really a big deal since the session encryption was insecure anyway. It feels almost like a honeypot after they've removed forward secrecy. If you’re looking for a decentralized alternative SimpleX Chat is a more secure option.
Surprised to hear this since my understanding was that Session was run on a crypto coin based, user hosted onion routing servers. Do they mean the dev company behind Session is shutting down?
An anecdote I have: a friend once had narcotics shipped intl. through Session a few years ago.
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year
Why not outsource this to a cheaper country? For example, here in Germany salaries are about half of that, and the talent pool is excellent.
Afaik Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?
The gross income to the employee might be 75k in Germany, but the cost to the employer is roughly twice that amount in turn.
In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.
Yeah , but the German pension system is unfortunately a scam . Therefore everyone is responsible for their own retirement (private investments e.g etfs) .
> In my (very naive) mental model, US salaries are higher, have a lot less "overhead" for the employer, but leave more responsibility (healthcare, retirement) to the employee.
Unfortunately this time, AI does not have vacations, healthcare, retirement or bills to pay and is available 24/7, 365 days on demand.
Many companies only see this as an opportunity to cut down on employees in 2026 and Session will do the same.
So that is why to answer your question:
> ...Germany is one of the most expensive countries for employing white collar jobs?
The main reason why the downsizing will continue until "AGI" is achieved internally.
Add 30% on top of your salary to cover social contributions+ healthcare.
Id do it for 1/3rd!
Claude (or any other chatbot) can do it for 1/100th of the cost and faster than anyone.
So $150k+ is overpriced.
They don’t say how they plan to avoid a repeat scenario a few months down the line.
Donations are fine, but something needs to change or people are just propping up a non-viable business.
A few months ago, a Session update logged me out. I tried to log back in, but my passphrase caused Session to crash. I tried the Play Store version, the F-Droid version, and the desktop version.
Support told me that login method had been around for a while, and I didn’t know it. So suddenly, I was locked out and couldn’t access MY ACCOUNT. I used to promote Session, but since their support response was basically a big “fuck you,” I say “fuck you too,” and I hope people switch to SimpleX.
I don't personally use it, but regardless, it'd be a shame to see it go
I'd love to know where the $600k that Vitalik Buterin donated to them 3 short months ago went. I don't think they've adequately addressed this question.
seems like it was $300k (the total was split between simpleX and session), but still—fair question
I like the idea. But I’m pretty happy with Signal. Signal does require a phone number I think, but otherwise seems very similar.
Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.
Session is not similar to Signal.
Session aims to provide anonymity, Signal aims to provide privacy.
>> Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage.
Yeah if you compare that with Facebook messenger and other such services but if you want secure communication it's not reasonable.
>Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage
In many jurisdictions, telecoms form an abusive oligopoly, and you need to provide a state-issued identity document to get a phone number.
That is not at all reasonable for normal usage - unlike well-known non-abusive authentication methods, such as a keypair; or its even simpler cousin, the username/password.
I guess it depends on what you consider normal. Most of the humans I know find it vastly easier to produce a state issued id to an authority than to generate a public/private key pair.
What's easier: to obtain state ID, or to sign up to a website with your preferred username and password?
Well, I and a lot of the people I'm going to talk to through things like Signal are going to have a state ID regardless as I live in a country where one practically needs to drive a car to function in society.
On top of that so many other things just inherently expect one to have a phone number. It would be somewhat odd to not have a phone number for most of the people I know and talk to through platforms like Signal.
So to your question of which is easier, having the state ID and a phone number is easier because I'll already have that for a multitude of reasons.
If you live in a place where its rare to have a phone number, then yes I agree Signal probably isn't a good choice.
Obtaining your first id is obviously difficult. But so is obtaining your first computer. If you’re on good terms with your government, obtaining the id is easier. That’s really the key. Sure if you focus on hostile states this stuff all makes sense. If you’re insistent on hiding from authorities then many things become much more difficult, by design.
> otherwise seems very similar.
It's worth mentioning that Session had started out as a fork of signal.
signal is really crappy. It fails at the most basic feature which is : deliver the message on time.
does it? have you been trying to use signal while disconnected from the internet?
I had a friend who complained about this too. I never understood it. She had a really cheap old android phone. Maybe that’s the issue?
I primarily use a nearly-bottom end android phone that's a few years old and just recently switched to an even older, even lower end android phone that is six years old. Neither has that issue.
Obviously, I'm not really claiming that it's not possible people are experiencing this issue, but it can't possibly be widespread.
I feel like most likely people are using android skins that aggressively kill apps in the background.
Signal's code quality is not conducive to security. They had an extremely bad state management bug that resulted in photos being sent to random contacts in your list (potentially life ruining implications if you're sending private photos).
For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.
Source?
Sad. I will need a new way to communicate with my guy.
Don't fall for it they pivoted after being crypto bros with a failed token. It's just more grift.
> In most markets Senior developers often command salaries exceeding $150,000 USD per year, and on top of this there are legal and operational overheads for running the STF.
Translation:
Our product makes no money, has no use case and we need $1M to survive.
Two ways a PE "cost saver" would fix this:
1. Claude + 1x senior engineer (in India).
2. CTO + Claude and no senior engineers / employees.
Given we have (allegedly) achieved "AGI" (heavily disputed) they don't need as many employees.
Especially those that are after $150k+ which when you can vibe code with Claude for less than $10k anyway. /s
Job done.
So you are suggesting that a private communications and messaging system that proports to offer reliable anonymity is a reasonable use case for more-or-less unsupervised development by Claude? Because that is just the sort of use case where I would NOT trust an unsupervised AI.